Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
2.
Allow the NPC to sell his special brew to the player.
•
It could be a special potion that both restores HP and removes some negative status
effects. The man could sell the potion to the player via Shop Processing.
•
Alternately, it could be a one-time gift that boosts the stats of the character who drinks it.
Other Sidequest Ideas
As promised, we have come up with one sidequest that the player can go on at any time, once it is active, and another
that has to be completed before a certain point in the game. Here are some other cool ideas that you can add to your
own game.
1.
A chest that works like
Final Fantasy
9's Excalibur.
•
Steps Taken or Play Time both work equally well for this. You could have a conditional
branch for the treasure chest that requires Steps Taken or Play Time to be below a certain
value. If the branch is true, then the chest will open; otherwise, a cryptic message will tell
the player that the chest is sealed until the end of time.
2.
A multistaged time-sensitive quest.
•
The
Tales
series of RPGs (developed by Namco Bandai) are notorious for this. You have
a quest that has five stages, but you have to finish the first stage before you beat the first
boss, the second stage before you set sail to a new continent. On the new continent, you
can start stage 3. Stage 4 requires that you not have uncovered the artifact of doom, while
the last stage is permanently unlocked once you're on your way to the final dungeon.
•
I'm not a huge fan of such types of quests, but they're not much harder to event than
a regular time-sensitive quest. You just have to have each subsequent stage of the
multi-quest check for the completion of the previous stage. If the player ever
skips/misses a stage, he/she cannot reach the quest's conclusion.
3.
A permanent sidequest that allows progression throughout the entire game.
•
For this particular idea, I'm thinking about
Dragon Quest
's Tiny Medals and
Grinsia
's Old
Glass Bottles. An NPC with a particular obsession wants you to collect all of the items of a
certain type in the world. Each time you reach a milestone of items collected, it will give
you a special item as a reward. It's something neat to do and look out for while traveling
the world, and you can turn in the last collectible right before you end the game
(or otherwise reach a point of no return).
In Chapter 10, I will be touching on a cool idea that could qualify as #3. But, given the eventing involved and what
you can do with it, I think it deserves a whole chapter's worth of material. The next chapter will be dedicated to
the functionality that will make it possible.
Summary
In this chapter, I covered the concept of sidequests in RPGs, and we added a permanent sidequest to our game that
could be done at any time, as well as a time-sensitive quest that must be completed before the player defeats Gemini.
In the next chapter, we will be discussing common events.
